A Hoppy Holiday

Today I woke up incredibly early, namely at around 9:15. Our guest G., Papa, and Mama were already awake; T. swiftly followed; J. eventually got up after I prodded him (one nice thing about J. is that he tends to be good-humoured when prematurely roused from sleep); and Gi. and Ge. persisted in slumbering on. Ge. was, it turns out, labouring under the delusion that it was only Saturday. Mama put on the "Hallelujah" chorus of Händel's Messiah -- she searched for our CD in vain and had to play a YouTube film instead -- and T. and I played "He shall feed his flock" on the recorder and piano.

Then those of us who were awake enjoyed an Easter feast: Mama's "Hefezopf" (braided yeast bread) in raisin-less and raisin-filled variants, salami and Schinkenspeck and cheeses, marmalade, painted hard-boiled and freshly cooked soft-boiled eggs, and chocolate, marzipan, and candy Easter eggs. We drank tea or coffee. The table looked lovely, too, with the purple tulips that G. had brought, decorations that Mama's co-workers had given her, the fine white linen tablecloth, the Gmundener plate, and the bright Easter eggs that were scattered over it. And, before I humanely decapitated my chocolate Easter bunny with my knife, I solemnly pronounced, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears," and pretended to tweak off the rabbit's auricular appendages. I've used the joke rather often, but still enjoy it. Outside snowflakes were drifting through the air and failing to establish themselves on the wet asphalt, and it was oddly quiet on the street.

After a short boxing match with J., I then began to paint two Easter eggs, on which I had sketched designs yesterday evening, with characteristic lousiness. One egg has a motif of spiral bands, intended to be dark blue, green, red, and yellow; the other has a small church nestled in bare trees on one side, and on the other side there is a woodland scene with dead leaves covering the soil, a daffodil, tree stems, and a golden-green lawn and pale blue sky glowing from behind them, inspired by the Volkspark scene that I described in the last post.

Having rapidly run out of motivation, I turned to the piano, in a bad mood because I've been playing it lousily lately. In the past two months I've started playing ragtime pieces by Scott Joplin -- not only the "Entertainer," which I had learnt when I still had piano lessons -- and these went well, since I find them congenial: light but not superficial, innocent, and cheerful, and pleasantly atmospheric. As I play them I often picture a non-demimondaine saloon in the Wild West.

Then, in contrast, there was the "mighty crash of harmonies" (as an early-twentieth-century story for schoolgirls once put it) of Beethoven's later sonatas, and of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (i.e. the first third of that piece). I've started playing the Sonata appassionata in its entirety, largely because I heard part of a Sviatoslav Richter recording of the third movement and it lingered pleasantly in my memory -- Beethoven's longer sonata movements occasionally still seem interminable, so it helps to have a sense of how to make it sound good, and to know that there are interesting motifs and developments later on. Now I also play the Moonlight Sonata and Waldstein Sonata in their entirety. What bothers me is that, though I can sightread these well enough, I don't play them very profoundly or inventively -- and, as usual, if I have a bad day I play these absolutely horridly.

As for the Hungarian Rhapsody, I sightread the whole thing once, but it was pointless and endless and charmless, because there are so many infinitesimal notes that make no sense unless played with the utmost speed. So I play up to the "Friska" and bring as much panache into it as is reconcilable with good taste and sincerity, the mood being somber and stern and passionate at the same time. But, like in Chopin's pieces, I wangle the little notes; for example, where one should play eight notes of equal length in the right hand over three notes of equal length in the left hand -- which doesn't even work cleanly in mathematics -- I divide the right hand's notes into one duplet and two triplets.

Anyway, before I went to sleep yesterday I read about the life of the Roman emperor Vespasian in Suetonius's Twelve Caesars. It was, like all of the preceding lives, a rattling good yarn. My Classical Studies course's teaching assistant once remarked that Suetonius was the "National Enquirer of Roman historians," but this assessment does him an injustice. It's true that, beginning with Tiberius's life, there are salacious tales of doubtful veracity, but the facts are well-rounded and solid, the style condensed and good, and the anecdotes well-chosen and interesting; and I think that the book is a fine introduction to Roman history. Besides, I think that the dramatic quality is great; it is not surprising that Shakespeare evidently took much material for his play Julius Caesar from the Twelve Caesars. Nero's life is tragi-comedy at its best -- as Sir Peter Ustinov proved in Quo Vadis?, despite the general historical inaccuracy of the film -- and Suetonius is unbelievably good at painting his character.

Vespasian seems comparatively congenial, an unaffected and even reluctant emperor, gifted with bluff good humour and the ability not to take himself too seriously; his main failing, as Suetonius stresses, is his tendency to financial exploitation that coexisted oddly with his tendency to generosity. There were two passages that I found particularly funny, one because of its exceedingly concise illustration of the abrupt ups and downs of Roman fortunes, and of the way that "mighty contests rise from trivial things"; the other in its rapid descent from the general to the specific, the serious to the ironic, and, above all, the sublime to the ridiculous, which is quite typical of Suetonius:

"He toured Greece in Nero's retinue but offended him deeply, by either leaving the room during his song recitals, or staying and falling asleep. In consequence he not only lost the Imperial favour but was dismissed from Court, and fled to a small out-of-the-way township, where he hid in terror of his life until finally offered the military command of a province."

"In the distribution of provinces Vespasian drew Africa, where his rule was characterized by justice and great dignity, except on a single occasion when the people of Hadrumetum rioted and pelted him with turnips."*

Last of all, the sun eventually emerged today, so Mama, G., Ge. and I went for a walk in the Kleistpark, past the St. Matthäus graveyard, to the Königin-Luise-Gedächtniskirche and the Zwölf-Apostel churchyard, then back (the whole route unfortunately adorned with copious dog droppings). It was frigid, and tiny drifts of snow remained in the crevices of the tree bark and on the ivy, but the blossoms were as bountiful as ever, and the sky was full of billowing white clouds and glimpses of serene blue. I've noticed that the silhouettes of the trees are not so harsh any more because of the tiny twigs and buds that have emerged; a few days ago this rendered the route to the Volkspark much more attractive than usual, because the tints of the trees blended in so well with the dark brick and brown and beige hues, and contrasted so nicely to the white, of the ambient buildings. And now the trees are a delicate lattice-work against the sky, instead of rakes.

*Source: Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. by Robert Graves (Penguin Classics, 1969)

P.S.: I know that the post title is lame, but I couldn't think of a better one.

In Memory of Two Lives

Last night I remembered that today, March 3rd, would have been Aunt Nora's birthday. She still comes to mind often. We frequently practice the Beethoven variations for cello and piano, the Haydn trios, the "classical pieces for beginners" (e.g. Händel's "Harmonious Blacksmith"), etc. that she, Papa, and (whenever he visited) Uncle Pu played during our Saturday visits to her old house in Victoria. Besides, she bequeathed us her books, so many of our music books were once hers, and we are the richer for a large and eclectic range of literature. I tried to think of a nice story about her, but I remember generalities better. First and foremost there was her generosity -- inviting people often and having bountiful edible provisions (e.g. Veuve Clicquot,), her role as Maecenas for the carpenters and artists and so on with whom she was acquainted, the seeds that she scattered out freely in the bird-house, our Easter egg hunts in her garden, etc. Besides, there was her sense of humour, which could be either benign or biting; her fondness of Einstein and an anecdote about his frustrated music teacher ("Can't you even count to three?!"), of crosswords, and of television shows like Dame Edna; and her habit of saying "Mon Dieu, quel horreur!" quickly when, for example, she nearly stumbled over something.

A few days ago Alice Ricciardi, a friend of Omama and Opapa died, too. I knew of her first when Opapa suggested that I send our family newsletter to her, so I wrote a letter (somewhat timidly addressing her by the first name, but she doesn't seem to have minded) to go with it, and a nice correspondence started. Her postcards and letters were brief and friendly; the cards generally had paintings by old Italian masters -- and, once, a black-and-white photograph of what I suspect to be the Arno -- on the front. When Mama and I went to Europe, she invited us to visit her in Italy. When we finally showed up, it was, I fear, quite unexpectedly, because we didn't have her current phone number. It was a rainy day and we had taken the train from Florence to Camucia. There we found out that she did not live in the town, but quite a ways further out, so we obtained her telephone number, called her and told her that we were at the train station. As it turned out that no taxi was available, we had to telephone again, and then she offered to come and fetch us in the car. I felt intensely guilty about the whole affair, especially as it turned out that her driver's license had lapsed and that she was running some legal risk, but her manner when she arrived was grave but not displeased.

First of all we walked a little through the streets of Camucia to buy dinner; we bought fish at what was probably a small restaurant, bread at a bakery, lettuce and grapes at a grocer's, and eggs in a store devoted largely to meats, with Parma hams hanging above the counter at the back. She had crutches, but got along the cobblestones quite well, as far as I remember. On the way back to her home, the right sideview mirror accidentally hit that of another car so that it snapped back; Alice remarked, "We'll get away with that one," and drove on with some preoccupation but no other feeling apparent. I felt rather awful at the time, but she undeniably handled it well.

Her house itself was an old brick building, which, I think she told us, was built in the early nineteenth century. Three or four cypresses stood to the right, and to the left there were pines, a garden shed, and a white gazebo with cosmea flowers around it. The guest bedroom was on the first floor, and to the right one could enter a long and cavernous living room, where boxes still stood chaotically after her move from Rome, and she told us that we could use the phone there to call home. On the second floor, accessible by an exterior staircase, there was the main living room, a kitchen, and her bedroom. The living room walls, adorned with paintings both modern and older (one scene of Mount Etna erupting had not yet been hung up), were simple, with a crack or two in one corner, and there were low shelves filled with books, like Omama's memoirs.

We ate dinner, with grapes for dessert (or "pudding," which, as Lela says, was the term she preferred), and then I cleaned out the hearth and, on the andirons, made a fire with newspaper, pinecones and pine wood under her direction. Then, in British English with an agreeably snuffly-sounding aristocratic accent, or in German, she told us about the house and the neighbourhood: her English neighbours, who had problems with their house because it was sinking into the ground, which was formerly swampland; the state of the olive and grape harvests; the marauding wild boars in Northern Italy and their predilection for chestnuts; etc. Politics came up, too. She mentioned that nearly everyone she knew in the area was an ex-communist, so it was surprising that Silvio Berlusconi had so much support; her friends in Israel, she said, were also amazed that people would vote for Ariel Sharon. Besides, she talked about her journey to a convention in Turkey, and about her work -- as a psychoanalyst -- with schizophrenic patients. When the subject turned to Mama's drawing, she was immediately interested, too. (I was mostly quiet -- partly because I liked listening, and partly because I only wanted to say something when it was worthwhile -- and it was quite comfortable.)

At that time I had gotten to know the sad part of growing old, like losing one's memory and mental acuity and self-control, and I was worrying about vegetating completely in the sedentary and depressed life I was leading. So it was a relief to meet Alice, who, at over ninety years of age, was most clear-minded, and who -- despite being stranded in the countryside with no friends nearby, essentially without a car, and with no television apparent -- was still interested in and well-informed about the world, and ready to go out and travel with an unforced stoicism. I still know little about her life and work, but as far as I have read about them, both testify strongly to the high calibre of her mind, her tolerance, and her bravery.

Windswept and Tempest-Tossed

The day before yesterday Hurricane Emma swept over Germany, but it appeared quite unspectacular (except perhaps in the mountains or at the shoreline), just heavy clouds and rain with a few strong gusts. I stood at J.'s and Ge.'s window for a while and watched the sky, which was mostly covered by billowy grey clouds with thin darker ones moving along underneath, and watched the antenna on a roof on the opposite building waggle in the wind, and a crude quadrilateral weathervane swinging around forty-five degrees and back again on its chimneytop perch. The doors and windows were often pushed out by gusts, accompanied by a general creaking, and the wind whistled in the oven in the corner room. In the evening news we were treated to another classic scene of a weatherman encased in a large jacket, subjected to the blustering wind and spraying brine of the seashore, clutching an oversized, furry (and, in this case, bedraggled) microphone that resembles a dog of the Pekingese breed, and trying to shout louder than the turbulent elements.

Yesterday and today the sky has still been a troubled grey, with gusts and rain, but the worst of it is apparently over. Before I went to sleep last night, inspired by a quick skim through a volume of Keats ("The Pot of Basil" is even more macabre than I remembered it), I wrote two bad poems. One, rhyming at first and then degenerating into free verse, has no intentional deeper meaning but, if one really wants to, one can read a whole lot into it. It's set in a coral city in whose interior there are great caverns populated by merpeople who look like blue-tinted Greek statues and grow beautiful, supple fins. In the central hall, where the mer-king sits on an enormous pearl in an ancient oyster, his people have gathered around him: his servants, his trident-bearing merman citizens, and ranks of mermaids who, their faces fixed in horror, are soundlessly singing a mournful song like the chorus in an ancient tragedy. Another tribe of merpeople, glittering in bronzen (it probably rusts in water, but whatever) and gold armour, descends on them and kills them all, and the waters of the cave turn turbid. They depart. The oyster slowly shuts on its pearl and guards the graveyard like a sphinx, but the débris settles to the seafloor as if it were only sand that had been stirred up by the silent passage of a giant sting-ray, and it seems as if nothing had happened. The End.

But for the second poem I wrote about the wind, and used the metaphor (which I'm probably not the first to come up with) that it rushes over the earth in search of something. When it stirs the leaves, it is rummaging among them; when it is violent, it is enraged that it cannot find the desired object and wreaks vengeance on whatever crosses its path; when it whistles through buildings it is subdued and dejected. I wrote the poem in French, though my I.Q. invariably drops about 50 points when writing in that language. After it was done, I remembered an infinitely better poem about the wind, namely Jean de la Fontaine's "Le Chêne et le Roseau," which T. and I read in our lessons with Marie. The last line has been echoing in my mind (so has "My Heart Will Go On" from the film Titanic, which I snobbishly abhor; but I have, after all, heard that song a million times).

Le Chêne et le Roseau

Le Chêne un jour dit au Roseau:
"Vous avez bien sujet d'accuser la nature;
Un roitelet pour vous est un pesant fardeau;
Le moindre vent, qui d'aventure
Fait rider la face de l'eau,
Vous oblige à baisser la tête,
Cependant mon front, au Caucase pareil,
Non content d'arrêter les rayons du soleil,
Brave l'effort de la tempête.
Tout vous est aquilon, tout me semble zéphyr.
Encor si vous naissiez à l'abri du feuillage
Dont je couvre le voisinage,
Vous n'auriez pas tant à souffrir:
Je vous défendrais de l'orage;
Mais vous naissez le plus souvent
Sur les humides bords des royaumes du vent.
La nature envers vous me semble bien injuste.
-- Votre compassion, lui répondit l'arbuste,
Part d'un bon naturel; mais quittez ce souci:
Les vents me sont moins qu'à vous redoutables;
Je plie, et ne romps pas. Vous avez jusqu'ici
Contre leurs coups épouvantables
Résisté sans courber le dos;
Mais attendons la fin." Comme il disait ces mots,
Du bout de l'horizon accourt avec furie
Le plus terrible des enfants
Que le Nord eût portés jusque-là dans ses flancs.
L'arbre tient bon; le Roseau plie.
Le vent redouble ses efforts,
Et fait si bien qu'il déracine
Celui de qui la tête au ciel était voisine,
Et dont les pieds touchaient à l'empire des morts.

From: Fables, Jean de la Fontaine (L'Aventurine, 2001)

* * *

Before I finally nodded off, I translated the fable. I worried most about capturing the essence of the words as well as the convoluted and stately word order, and least about reproducing the rhythm, etc., with any great technical fidelity. To do justice to the seventeenth-century language, I tried to use antique-ish terms and grammar whenever they were better than modern ones. (Aquilon, by the way, is the Roman equivalent of the Greeks' North Wind, Boreas.) Today I revised it a little, and found it decent, so here it is:


The Oak and the Reed

One day the oak said to the reed:
"You surely have cause to accuse Nature;
A wren for you is a burden most weighty,
The least wind that by chance
Wrinkles the water's countenance
Obliges you to bend your head,
Whilst my brow, to the Caucasus in powerful resemblance,
Not content with stopping the rays of the sun
Braves the efforts of even the tempest.
For you every wind is an Aquilon;
to me every wind is a Zephyr.
And, if you were born in the shelter
Of the foliage with which I o'erspread the vicinage,
You need not have suffered so greatly;
I had defended you from the storm;
But you are born most often
On the watery borders of the domains of the wind.
Toward you nature seems to me highly unjust.

"Your compassion," replied to him the plant,
"Arises from natural goodness; but relinquish that care:
The winds are less menacing to me than to you,
For I bend but I do not break.
Until now you have, against their fearful blows,
Resisted without bowing your back,
But let us await the end." As he spoke out these words
From the edge of the horizon there rushes with fury
The most terrible of the children
That the North had borne until then in his flanks.
The tree holds out well; the reed bows,
The wind redoubles his efforts,
And does so well that he tears out the roots
Of him whose head had once neighboured the sky
And whose feet were touching the empire of the dead.